Evaluating China's fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions from a comprehensive dataset of nine inventories

Pengfei Han , Ning Zeng , Tom Oda , Xiaohui Lin , Monica Crippa , Dabo Guan , Greet Janssens-Maenhout , Xiaolin Ma , Zhu Liu , Yuli Shan , Shu Tao , Haikun Wang , Rong Wang , Lin Wu , Xiao Yun , Qiang Zhang , Fang Zhao , Bo Zheng (1)

1 LSCE - Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement [Gif-sur-Yvette]

China's fossil-fuel CO₂ (FFCO₂) emissions accounted for approximately 28 % of the global total FFCO₂ in 2016. An accurate estimate of China's FFCO₂ emissions is a prerequisite for global and regional carbon budget analyses and the monitoring of carbon emission reduction efforts. However, significant uncertainties and discrepancies exist in estimations of China's FFCO₂ emissions due to a lack of detailed traceable emission factors (EFs) and multiple statistical data sources. Here, we evaluated China's FFCO₂ emissions from nine published global and regional emission datasets. These datasets show that the total emissions increased from 3.4 (3.0-3.7) in 2000 to 9.8 (9.2-10.4) Gt CO₂ yr^-1 in 2016. The variations in these estimates were largely due to the different EF (0.491-0.746 t C per t of coal) and activity data. The large-scale patterns of gridded emissions showed a reasonable agreement, with high emissions being concentrated in major city clusters, and the standard deviation mostly ranged from 10 % to 40 % at the provincial level. However, patterns beyond the provincial scale varied significantly, with the top 5 % of the grid level accounting for 50 %-90 % of total emissions in these datasets. Our findings highlight the significance of using locally measured EF for Chinese coal. To reduce uncertainty, we recommend using physical CO₂ measurements and use these values for dataset validation, key input data sharing (e.g., point sources), and finer-resolution validations at various levels.

Domaines: Planète et Univers [physics]

Pengfei Han, Ning Zeng, Tom Oda, Xiaohui Lin, Monica Crippa, et al.. Evaluating China's fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions from a comprehensive dataset of nine inventories. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2020, 20, pp.11371-11385. ⟨10.5194/acp-20-11371-2020⟩. ⟨insu-03721894⟩